Empty the cup

I empty 
my cup, filled with decaying answers
recycled
the dead nurtures

I empty 
my cup, held by its vacancy
revered
the unknown opens

we empty 
our cups, sharing fullness
received
the grip loosens

shattered in symphony
cups transform
become
us, vessels

so we empty 
again and again
replenished
life rejoices 

In my mother tongue, we use classifiers to go with most nouns. For example, rain is just rain in English. In Chinese, rain takes up space: it’s always a field of rain. 2022 feels like a field of heavy summer rain: rapid, invigorating, releasing, opening up to a forgotten feeling: smells of lush greens and softened earth, a sense of cleanse and renewal.

I am grateful for my rain dance adventures and its successful conjuring, as well as how much the rain field of 2022 had acted on my: the space it opened, the energy it gifted, and the offloading it helped.

Much gratitude to be expressed, perhaps the little poem above says more than lengthy paragraphs.

Communities

This is a continued theme from last year’s revelation. I am grateful for continuously encountering with beautiful souls in new contexts and places.

• Sound Observer
  My partner Adrian and I have been facilitating sound meditations for two years now. Building a living community have illuminated much internal confidence and faith which I didn’t see. I’ve learned to feel the texture of togetherness and allow it take on its own form. I relish the practice of facilitation and how it enables the process of unfolding our interconnectedness and collective beauty.

• The Nearness
  This 8-week online peer-run program had opened some new frequencies for me to listen, to hum, and to learn how to harmonize in a non-hierarchical setting. I teamed up with four other wonderful new friends. Every Sunday night we hold space together and share our spiritual life. Much gratitude for this nurturing journey together.

• Evening sculpture class at New York Studio School
  I signed up for the class on a whim. I ended up with a bunch of terra cotta figures, many Monday evening laughters, and the sense of descending into a deep bed where touching is the primary sense. I loved my classmates coming from various backgrounds: consultancy, finance, yoga, editorial. It reminds me that although we might have certain roles to play in our life, we have access to creation at any time.

Top books of 2022

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (Memoir)

• The Nightingale by Sam Lee (Nature Writing)

• The Way of the Rose by Clark Strand and Perdita Finn (Spirituality)

• Karma by Sadguru (Spirituality)

• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté (Psychology)

Top media of 2022

• Irma Vep (TV Series)
  This is an interesting one which you can see it from many angles. For me, it’s a poetic exploration between film and TV making. Many moments brought me back to my teenage years watching foreign indie films. This show reminded me why I loved cinema and how interesting it is to watch a form of media changing over time.

• Extraordinary Attorney Woo (TV Series)
  It’s a very touching show, if you could drop your prejudice against Korean legal drama and the over-exaggerated post-production style.

• Inu-Oh (Film)
  I watched this animation in theater. Great metaphor around how artist transmute their trauma into beauty by listening and offering.

Other top things

• 1:1 voice sessions with Yvonne de Bruijn from Pansori Living Sound (Practice)

• Granulated watercolors (Material)

• Hobonichi planner (Tool)

• Daily drawing group - 狂野的速写 (Practice)

• Breathwork in the morning at Prospect Park during summer (Practice)

• Morning pages (Practice)

till next time,
.y

Most conversations in today’s social interactions have limited focal length. They capture the world in a way similar to how an ordinary eye sees: “What’s new with work?… how’s the family? … how’s the recent trip to the seaside?…” Same as camera lenses, questions can get heavy and clumsy when it wants to look further into life. We feel it is only appropriate to leave those responsibilities to professionals.

Over the years, I’ve learned a thing or two about taking photos. You have to work with what you have, and equipment is just part of it. Understanding how light travels is more important than having big lenses. Maybe try some filters when working in limited conditions. You’d be surprised how they influence the outcome.

I am a fan of Krista Tippett’s On Being podcast. She usually starts her interview with the same question: “What’s the spiritual background of your childhood?” This question carries a magical hazy effect, like a mist lens filter that creates a subtle dreamy atmosphere. Sweet childhood memory lowers the contrast of talking about spirituality on a normal weekday. It leads to interesting portraits.

Recently, I asked the same question to a filmmaker at a random party. Perhaps because he digs stories as much as I do, after sharing his own, he returned the question to me. I told him, like most Chinese people, none of my family belongs to any organized religion. They lead a quite simple, secular life, with a special connection to their land, the moon and a lunar calendar, certain rituals, and their ancestors. An elder Chinese like my grandmother, knows it is necessary to bribe the kitchen deity with sticky candy before the Lunar New Year so it would only speak good words of the family. This animistic lifestyle seemed to surprise him.

When a Chinese baby reaches their first birthday, traditionally a ritual called Zhuazhou (抓周) will be performed. It means to “grab the anniversary.” The family will put various objects in front of the baby for them to choose from. The child’s pick would predict their future. These things usually are symbols of how people make a living: a book for scholars, a calculator for businessmen, a pen for writers, etc, etc. When I had my ritual, I got my hands on an egg.

An egg is an ambiguous option to even have in this ritual. Maybe it tells a life of raising chickens. Maybe it says a person always enjoying food. When I first heard the story as a kid, I felt disappointed. I secretly wished my parents had put more exotic things and I would have chosen them: perhaps a crystal, or a sword, anything interesting, just not a simple egg.

When I went to school, I first heard the famous (fabricated) story about Da Vinci and his egg drawings. I thought, “Oh, there are more to eggs.” But it would take me many more years to see an egg as something beyond food or props, but as a symbol.

A few years ago I went on a long hike with some friends. I told my egg story to one of them. He happened to be reading The Hobbit along the way. So he shared the famous Bilbo’s riddle:

A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.

Maybe an egg is not that simple. After all, it hides life inside.

In myths from many cultures, the cosmos is an egg. It cracked open and birthed all beings. It’s the World Egg, the Cosmic Egg, or the Mundane Egg.

The word “mundane” is an interesting one. In the dictionary, it is both “referring to something of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual world,” as well as “not interesting or exciting.” This word shows the dualistic view of our thinking: as if the spiritual and earthy aspects of being are put in a gladiator’s ring. At first, they were equal parts, as the Latin root “mundus” simply means “world.” Over the years, as human minds dwell in the earthy realm for too long, they become bored of it. “Mundane life” sounds like a drag, isn’t it?

For a while, I forgot spirituality is mundane, or mundane life is spiritual. For the life force to flow from the cosmos to us, it needs to be undivided. Transcendence is not a journey from low to high, the mundane to the spiritual. Instead, to transcend is to recognize a circle - a beginning as an ending; a sphere - an inner working for a latent nothing to become an active something to breakthrough. It’s like an egg.

Jung writes in the Red Book:

Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.

And behold it.

And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.

Christmas has come. The God is in the egg.

Connecting with oneself can also feel like photography: you gaze into memories of past and future, shift perspectives, focus, trying to form a truthful illustration of your existence. It’s lifetime artistry - to master understanding light and darkness and allow the dynamic range to reveal rich images.

“What’s the spiritual background of your childhood?” I asked myself.

I wasn’t promised a heaven nor warned a hell. There were no souls but spirits of living things and things that had lived. I was encouraged to observe the weather from the presence of clouds and the moon. I learned some plant and bird names. I’ve been told to respect my ancestors who had carried life.

And I picked a mundane egg for my future.

The most fascinating theme in the analysis of this poem is the discussion around “nature” vs. “art.” The Bower is supposed to imitate the paradise, Garden of Eden, which is created by God, just like the great Nature itself. Meanwhile, unlike paradise, the Bower is an earthly artifact, made by an artful witch to lure ignorant humans so they would be doomed to stay in an illusion forever. It seems that Spencer praises the virtue of the Knight of Temperance. However, in the poem, he left some commentary that makes the reader ponder his real opinion of art:

One would haue thought, (so cunningly, the rude,
And scorned parts were mingled with the fine,)
That nature had for wantonesse ensude
Art, and that Art at nature did repine;
So striuing each th'other to vndermine,
Each did the others worke more beautifie;
So diff'ring both in willes, agreed in fine:
So all agreed through sweete diuersitie,
This Gardin to adorne with all varietie.

This piece of teaching stuck with me ever since. I’ve shared the story with many friends. Sometimes, I used the story to warn the danger of our digital reality, where there are extreme sensory stimulations and excessive consumption, and how it might trap us in this artificial beauty forever, losing the hope for returning to the great nature. However, I’ve also used the story to praise human inventions: if not the great arts and technology, would we learn to appreciate the diverse nature of reality?

Recently I listened to a podcast between Kara Swisher and Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality (who worked on VR goggles and gloves in the 80s). For a long-time technologist, Jaron Lanier’s view on reality is not as what an average person would expect :

“…I find it astonishing because when you try to understand reality as it is and you start to appreciate just how subtle it is, or if you just — I don’t know, just playing a real bamboo flute compared to any digital instrument ever. Or just a real person, just being with a real person, looking at their face, touching them, I think there’s an infinity, an open horizon for all time of just appreciating the physical world more. Whereas the digital world can also grow and become more and more creative. I’ve noticed lately that anything you can use to write text with that’s digital is starting to try to predict ahead. So we’re letting the past of language control the future of language in a way that it didn’t before. But at the same time, ultimately, the digital world is us stewing in our own juices. That the algorithms are based on taking the past and limiting the future to the past……

…… But the thing is, if you want to try to draw an airtight sense of the world where there’s no mystery and everything makes perfect sense, you’ll find that you can’t. There’s always some seam. There’s some seam, like some observer problem or some, why are we here and not there? What is it that positions us here? And you always end up back with a mystical sense of experience. You can’t really get rid of something about the experience itself that’s a little metaphysical. And so the thing is that any digital world, no matter how elaborate, no matter how beautiful, is going to be most valuable as a form of contrast to notice that mystery.”

Yes, Jaron, thank you for your words. Any digital world, like any “Art” (human creation), is meant to provide a portal and an opportunity to observe the physical reality (nature) itself in an unfamiliar way. It is a fractal of the real reality (consciousness), which, is infinite yet bound by our past conditioning.

I marvel at how experimental we’ve become with making virtual realities. The digital world is the Bower of Bliss of our age. I remember when I was a lonely teenager, how the internet made me feel: just like an exotic garden - I wanted to click on everything and inhale every bit. Now as someone who draws pixels of this garden for the past ten years, I smell people’s eagerness to get out. No matter how beautiful we illustrate this world, it is ultimately a snapshot.

Sometimes I wonder where we’ll go with this experiment as we feel so lost in our fabricated realities. I hope we reach a realm where we approach temperance with understanding and acceptance, unlike the Knight’s destructive action. The desire to birth something beautiful is never wrong to claim. Exfoliation, when the surface of beauty starts to dry out, is also necessary. However, maybe in the future, we can maintain a garden, not for earthly tetherings, but for heavenly offerings.

Till next time,

.yiming

The Middle Way of Creation

“I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.” ―Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium

In 2021, I thought a lot about polarities. One set particularly: to invent and to restore.

People in tech love to quote Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This can-do spirit was what lured me to tech. Now almost ten years pushing pixels on screens, I’ve seen many tools have been carelessly unleashed to the collective consciousness and turned into deities, slavering after our attention and worship. Technology breaks the power dynamic between man and nature. But perhaps the imbalance has been there all the way, ever since Prometheus gave human fire, generating heat for change and evolution.

To restore has always been a core concept in my culture. My people believed you always return to where you started, like the seasons. When the 1911 Revolution ended China’s last imperial dynasty, even the revolutionists promoted Confucian Returning. The major figure, Yuan Shikai, shortly attempted to restore the hereditary monarchy. Of course, this piece of history became a textbook example of how not to restore anything obsolete. Modern China has been quite forgetful. People are busy imitating the west by inventing themselves. An eastern soul had always been closer to their lands and the spiritual world than a nation, or an ideology, or even self-identity. But now, they have orphaned themselves by declaring the invention of a new society. Or is it new?

Sometimes I wonder, can we really invent anything? A person can claim ignorance of history and deny their ancestors. But their minds are still woven in the tapestry of consciousness, which, since the very beginning, has never missed a thread of human thoughts. New tech products pop like mushrooms after the rain. They are still like old ones: some are consumable, some are poisonous, some, alter your consciousness states. On the other hand, I wonder, can we really restore anything? Every time we attempt to take a thing out of its historical context, we always ended up making a monster either look too hideous or too kitsch. I’ve seen many people who claim to be the missionary restoring ancient wisdom, only to be found out as culture merchants selling re-packaged behavioral codes from the past.

Thinking about polarities can be tiring until you learn the technique of simultaneously holding on and letting go. Then it becomes interesting: suddenly it transcends the mind to a different dimension, where there is a middle way - it doesn't compromise on either end. Rather, this path offers enough tension to hold strings. If you learn how to play in this realm, the vast beauty of reality will start to form its melodic patterns.

This string I am drawing here is called creation. At its ends are the impulse to invent and to restore.

My friends, entering the creation of a new year. Maybe we can practice how to pluck better notes together, by looking beyond a future we are pulling to invent or restore.

Communities

The biggest thing I realized in 2021 is the power of community. I tried to get more of it by participating. I’ve come a long way alone in my life so I am much comfortable in one-on-one interactions. How to engage with communities and how to do my service in a multi-directional setting, I still have much to learn.

The following is a list of communities I’ve been a part of, big or small.

• The Cauldron Playing with creative facilitation. I paired with a young Chinese performance artist who lives in Israel (as a facilitator for her) and an older New York filmmaker (as a recipient of her facilitation). It was a cool experiment.

• Sound school by David Shemesh I attended the 2nd sound facilitator training at Menla Institute in the summer. This now feels like my soul family.

• Radif retreat This year I picked up a Persian instrument called Setar. In December, I flew to New Mexico’s Bohdi Manda Zen Center and became part of the 2nd Radif retreat. I was born on the silk road. Maybe thousands of years ago, these beautiful songs had already reached the land and have been conjuring me to explore.

• Gleaners Good people, as always. Kris is an inspiration for running diverse communities.

• Homeward Bound I wish I showed up more here. I’ve been a secret fan of Dougald since I participated in his and Anna’s workshop in Sweden in 2018. Another inspiration for community makers.

• WEST My friend Karen is managing this mentorship program and I participated in the fall cohort. Giving others advice feels…good?

• Sound Observer This is my practice. My partner and I co-facilitated six sound ceremonies and a few online meditations. We also wrote seven newsletters together. I am proud of myself for starting a baby step to bring people together.

Top books of 2021

• The Mind Illuminated by John Yates

• Bodystories by Andrea Olsen

• High Weirdness by Erik Davis

• Foucault pendulum by Umberto Eco

• Genesis of a Music by Harry Partch

Other top things

• Erik Davis’s Burning Shore (newsletter)

• Michelle Lhooq’s Rave New World (newsletter)

• Get Down NYC (party)

• Pansori Living Sound (school)
  I encountered Yvonne de Bruijn’s book about her journey with her voice and its healing power earlier last year. I immediately signed up for her school when finish reading, only to find out I had to miss it because of the pandemic. I am holding my intention to meet her in person in 2022.

• Summer Camp Island (TV series)

  It’s an animation show. One episode is only 11 mins. I absolutely love the wild imagination and cuteness of this show.

• Pawpaw and Persian sweet lemon (fruits)

  I tasted two new fruits in 2021. I become more aware of how knowing more wonderful humans could expand my experience with earth, and how commercial supply chains had both extended and flattened our ways of being.

Till next time,

.yiming

I planned to write about something lighter. But sometimes an idea just pounds on your door till you let it in. So here we are.

My grandfather is dying: Pancreatic cancer, diagnosed last year, just went through chemotherapy. These days, he could only take in liquids. His four children, including a nurse and a doctor, still live close by. They take him on walks every morning. Although none of them is religious, they learned the most basic mantra chanting from a Buddhist friend and started eating vegetarian, believing doing so will make him feel better about the last days.

In many ways, my grandfather is getting the level of support most dying people don’t have today. But it doesn’t make the process easier. He cries often, filled with remorse for an unlived life and resentment against history. Many missed opportunities in life have knotted over his heart, netting a heavy load of regret, sadness, and agony. He doesn’t have enough time to untie his heart, he thinks, because of him dying.

We are all in the same process called dying, initiated since the moment we took our first breath. If lucky, we die on good terms: peaceful, insightful, forgiving, and content, ideally, surrounded by people we love. However, most of us, like my grandfather, don’t realize the dying process until the very last stage. By then, it feels too late to prepare a graceful meeting with death itself, also, too late for another song to dance with life.

In Chinese culture, there are rituals across seasons to connect with the dead. I remember a time when people still believed in ghosts, there was always a day in early autumn when they would burn paper ornaments for their ancestors at crossroads. I would walk home from school, encountering many circles of ash residue, reminding me that someone had lived, died, and being remembered.

I came to America nine years ago to study design, thus spent a lot of time in New York museums. The first time I visited the Met, I had a very visceral understanding of how the east and the west gesture towards living and death: when I walked into the gallery hall of Greek and Roman sculptures, I saw perfect prime bodies carved out of flawless marble: glowing, bold, juicy, and immortal; when I entered the gallery room of ancient Chinese paintings, I saw discolored scrolls displaying mountains and waters, occasionally spotting some dried-up old dudes standing in the corner of the painting, ready to fade out and ascend to the heaven. Ever since that moment, I started to think: should we blame the Romans for this maniac teenager lifestyle of today’s capitalistic society?

After school, I got into the tech industry: working with baby genius dropouts, dreaming of electric sheep, designing systems to capitalize on “user engagement”. Soon I found there is something wrong. I remember in 2017 I shared a uber to the airport with a perfect stranger and told him, “I think technology these days needs more spirituality.” That was the first time I felt I vocalized an inner truth I’ve been longing for. My stranger friend nodded. We both thought there was something there. But neither of us could tell what really is there.

Four years later, I think I know what is there: technology needs to respect death instead of rejecting it. All beings die. Bodies, businesses, relationships, even earth don’t last forever. If we only perceive time in a linear way, we’d miss out on beauty in the cycles of things. If we constantly live in the denial of death, we’d surely rebut the point of living.

Unfortunately, confronting death is an unpopular idea in today’s world, a world all about infinite growth. Our ambition is high: we’d create a brighter future, maybe in space, with UBI, endless entertainment, decentralized markets, extreme efficient AIs, a panacea for all diseases… Just watch this interview titled “Peter Thiel vs. William Hurlbut: Should Technology Treat Death as an Enemy?” from 2019, in which Thiel claims “…finding meaning in death doesn’t work anymore.”

Countless times in conversations with tech friends “stagnation” as a word comes up. Although we all live in this “Agile” environment where we run tight sprints and ship features every week. We’ve lost our feelings for tech. As kids grew up with the internet, tinkered around web pages as young teens, we didn’t sign up to manufacture products. The stagnation is so bad that even Peter Thiel is frustrated with it. Ironically, he doesn’t realize it’s capitalists like him, clinging to a dying system, refusing to see its ending, stopping things from transformation.

In Thoth tarot, “Death” is the 13th card, represented by Hebrew letter נ (nun), the Qabalistic path joining Tiphareth (Beauty) to Netzach (Victory). The letter means “Fish”, a living being known for its crazy breeding capability and rapid decay. It is a stinky card, yet it also quickly generates rising heat, which will be used in the following 14th card, “Art”, in which a cauldron is getting ready for creation.

Without the energy from Death, Art can’t work with mixing the polarities of yin and yang for boiling a balanced new soup of life. Remember The First Law of Thermodynamics? Energy cannot be created or destroyed - only transformed.

So really, we shall all adopt Heidegger’s view: “Being-toward-death”. First, we acknowledge our own dread of death, ponder upon how we wish to die, summon the courage to live an authentic life to honor the inevitable death. By doing so, we’d also gain the wisdom to apprehend time as a rhizome, in which death buds life. Hopefully, this practice will glorify all living things as precious gifts and honor all dying things as graceful existence.

Last but not least, here are some pretty things about death. In art, some painters would paint memento mori, which means “remember that you must die” in Latin. We see this in 17-18 century Vanitas paintings such as the following:

We also see it in modern art:

My favorite Frank Zappas album, made in his last years with cancer:

And this honest essay from art critic Peter Schjeldahl about “The Art of Dying”.

Till next time,

.yiming

Our first new moon of 2021 just arrived on Wednesday 12a EST. How is your new year so far? I hope in this seemingly more dissonant, improvised, noisy world, you are in tune with your inner metronome and play in rhythm.

I’ve been thinking about calendars a lot recently. At the beginning of this year, I participated in yoga teacher Nevine Michaan’s zoom calendar workshop. Nevine puts out a calendar and a planner every year. I was given one back in 2019 while doing yoga teacher training. I didn’t understand the meaning behind the gift. Contaminated by contemporary culture, I used to see planners as a tool to get things done. I experimented with many planners, journals, calendars, digital GTD products. I was constantly anxious about missing out on things to do, friends to hang out with, and new information to assimilate. Ideas, anecdotes, excerpts, ambitions piled up in my books, along with accumulated emotions: guilt, bewilderment, tension, and exhaustion.

I start to use my planner and journals differently this year after truly listening to Nevine’s teaching. Instead of using them for dreaming the future or reminiscing the past, they became a tool for mediating my presence. This is a radical perspective shift, although, from the outside, things look similar: tasks are written down and daily reflections are recorded. My inner vision has changed: tasks and journals are meant for making present beats for myself. If beats are right, I’ve got a rhythm of life.

Invent your own calendar, Nevine says, put yourself in the center.

Two years later I finally understood Nevine’s teaching: personal calendar is symbolic for empowerment because it measures time, the ultimate equitable life material; using one’s calendar well means claiming personal power and responsibility.

If you have ever visited Beijing and been to the Palace Museum, You must have passed by the Hall of Supreme Harmony, where the emperors used to hold court and discuss governance. In front of the Hall, there are two objects: a sundial, which measures time, the other called Jialiang, which measures volume.

Emperors didn’t need to time their meetings. Why did they put up a sundial? It was a monument to the divine power: carved out of white marble, it is durable, heavy, unshakable, carrying the wishes that their heavenly bestowed power will last forever.

Sundials are long gone with the old empire. However, new timekeeping monuments have been manufactured to display power over oneself: festivals celebrated by consumerism, our social media personas, engagement-optimized apps, endless streaming watchlist… All of them have their own agendas and all of them want time from you. Be careful with them.

Time is what you make a living out of. Have some DIY spirit and figure out how to use it wisely and joyfully.

Here is a quote from Jorge Luis Borges:

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

If you want to leave more time for yourself to think about time, I would recommend you read Borges. Borges, like most great artists, sculpts and polishes time into mirrors for us to gaze upon and to recognize where we are standing in our world. There are many ways for our poor little mind to understand time: trying to decipher quantum physics, or losing in philosophical maze, or getting hocussed by occultists… But for me, only beauty, discovered through art and nature, releases butterflies in my chest. Remember in Goethe’s Faust, what’s the forbidden words to end Faust’s life(time)?

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! — Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

Time, is a very human thing, personal yet universal, poetic yet political. To ponder on time is to contemplate our earthy existence. What freezes time? What bends time? What amplifies time? What goes beyond time?

That’s all I could say for this time. It has to end with beauty.

.yiming

For the first time in my life, I carried a 30+ pound backpack for days straight, winding through grasslands, climbing up hills, sliding down ravines, and crossing rivers. Prior to the trip, I was informed that glacial river crossings would make this trek fun. However, for a city dweller who doesn’t know how to swim, fording rivers with a full backpack was scary. How would I respond to the unknown at the moment?

The first thing I learned in 2020: paying full attention opens a new dimension for personal growth.

Rapid water turned out fortuitously enjoyable. In the center of a stream, I carved the current, pushing its force out to form a meditative invisible sphere, where inside it’s just me and the water: the bustling sound, glittering surface, infiltrating coldness, its formidable weight. I was compelled to fully embrace a truly wild thing with all my awareness, and at that moment I discovered new territory in me — commensurately raw, powerful, and enduring.

Never could I have imagined this hike would be my last chance to travel. I had lunch on Lunar New Year’s day with a Chinese friend. We ate Russian dumplings at a restaurant called Mari Vanna, decorated like an opulent grandma’s cozy house. We sat at a big table under a chandelier, and we talked about the Wuhan lockdown. She insisted that I buy masks, of which I was convinced. It had rained all morning, and we were more or less alone in the restaurant. I’d been to Mari Vanna several times, and it had always smelt lively — like a stuffed tipsy cherry jar. But that afternoon, it was zestless. Its emptiness gave off an indistinct cosmic melancholy as if we could only make it to lunch because we didn’t party hard enough last night. Looking back, I must have caught some looming thoughts in the collective consciousness. Weeks later, China was under lockdown, and a few weeks after that, so was New York.

Experiencing a collective crisis like COVID, combined with techno-medical despotism, is difficult to communicate with language. New words and memes, as well as old fables and ethos, are called for to tell this odd 21st-century story. I ask myself, how is the pandemic changing the way I view this world and shape my narrative?

The second thing I learned: reading old myth reveals coordinates for understanding, and learning new tools for creating new myth, holds space for transformation.

My ancestors were farmers living by the famous Yellow River. The river basin offered abundance for them to build a civilization. In the old myth, the goddess Nüwa, who created humans, had to repair the leaking heaven to stop the flood on the earth. On the Mediterranean islands, ancient greeks didn’t need flood tamers but had to rely on the fire stolen by Prometheus, who is also credited with the creation of humanity. In both myths, humans were created out of clay, vulnerable, dirty, squishy, and struggling to continue their lives on earth. They needed a little help from the invisible world, and thus, the east gets its harnessed water and the west its fire.

Harnessing water or stealing fire are symbols for tools. Because of the pandemic, I had a lot of time to read and re-read myths. When I put more and more of these mythic metaphors together, the map of human consciousness gets bigger and bigger. In this process, however, I was lost in deep dives on maps from people like Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley. I kept mapping, forgetting that territory is what matters. How could I forget the human conditions we were in? If I looked outside, it was heartbreaking to see how we, as living beings with so much potential were trapped in our apartments, traumatized by the mazes of our old stories. I asked myself: what tools could empower us to write a new story?

I am grateful to have found sound and dreamwork.

In September, I participated in my first sound ceremony with my teacher, a sound magician, David. After integrating the event, I decided to go deeper into the sonic space and joined David to train as a sound practitioner.

The ceremony and the training happened in real life. I had my hesitations at the beginning with group events in COVID times. As a kid, I had a lot of respiratory issues. The pandemic triggered my deep-rooted fear of unwellness in the body. My favorite philosophers Giorgio Agamben or Michel Foucault both talked about how the body internalizes oppression from the collective ego (in their language, political machines), and freedom comes from recognizing this trap. However, from learning to living, there is still a big gap. Luckily, curiosity overcame fear. I showed up and came back with a new power tool in my pocket.

My partner and I facilitated our first sound ceremony in early December. It felt sacred to create a sonic container, holding the space for service, both to self and other’s transformation. Looking back at the start of my sound school essay, I wrote:

As a sound practitioner, the job is to carve out that space, where the psyche can be left in silence to learn to sing. This space is surrounded with intentional sound waves, converging into a moat, guarding the sacred silence. When the water of the moat starts to fill up and rise, the practitioner must remind the participants not to panic or indulge, instead, they should be ready to swim and across the sounds to silence.

Sound ceremonies are power plants for our body and psyche. The question is: once you are charged, how are you going to maintain and use the energy? In one ceremony, I slipped into a non-duality state. Ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told a story: he dreamed of himself became a butterfly. Upon waking up, he couldn’t remember if it is him turning into a butterfly in the dream, or the butterfly turning into him in the reality. The non-dual experience rent the veil and showed me that this reality is a collective dream in which we choose to co-create. To maintain lucidity in this dream called reality requires technique. I needed to know dreams better.

I had dabbled in dream journaling because of my interest in Jung. I’d also read some Tibetan dream yoga materials. Intuitively, a consistent dreamwork practice seemed to be the missing thread I needed to knit. I discovered Jennifer Dumpert’s wonderful book Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep, which made it easy for me to understand and play with the basic mechanics of dream consciousness. Dumpert’s work focuses on the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of the dream, which make up the bardo in between wake and sleep. I discovered a synergy between my dreamwork and spiritual practice. I’d lay down instead of sitting up in meditation, getting my body into the pre-sleep state while keeping my mind awake. This turned out an easier way for me to get to a deeper meditative state.

Sound and dreamwork are both useful tools to recognize the layers of linguistic labels we put on ourselves, which were given by ancestors, manufactured by culture/political systems, and passed on from kinship. My goal is not to denounce the value of language, but to understand how it constructs our reality. If we could transmute language and invent new myths, we would surely shift reality. We live by myth and its metaphors.

I had many reflections on my obsession with tools and abstract thinking in 2020. Growing up as a brainy kid, I regularly escaped into books and daydreams. Even though I practiced yoga for six years, I’ve only recently come to the revelation of what embodiment really means and why it is important.

The most important thing I learned in 2020: knowing my body and its signals, is my ultimate key to a deeper, richer, and more joyful life.

For almost all my life, I put mind over body and art over nature. I am satisfied with how far this perspective took me, but also recognize how it is no longer sufficient. The hoarded information became baggage for my mind rather than fuel for joyful expression. As a society, we are also experiencing a similar dilemma: data is everywhere, nowhere comes insights. In Thoth tarot, thoughts are symbolized by swords. When swords reach their peak as the final card, they all compete and break. This card is called “Ruin”, implying endless analysis with the complete loss of hope and belief. The bright side of this energy is since old belief is burnt out and ruined, we can anticipate that new hope is on the way.

For me personally, many good things in 2020 required me to use my body fully: an unforgettable hike, psychedelics, instruments, lucid dreams… These cosmic gifts showed me new ways to experience, to learn, and to engage. Collectively, this global illness made everyone reconsider how our bodies are governed, what wellness means, and if a new lifestyle is called for on earth.

2020 was an embodied year in spite and in light of us being socially distanced with sanitized touch.

The most important technique in lucid dreaming is touch. If a dreamer understands how to maintain their body sensation, they can remain lucid better and longer. I find this anecdote also applies to real life, this collective dream we are all in. Embodiment leads to a grounding lucidity, which makes us grow fuller and richer. If we are lucid, we can see each other and the earth in higher fidelity, so that we can appreciate true beauty. If we are lucid, we can hear with accuracy and communicate with clarity. If we are lucid, we can conjure smells connecting us to memories and futuristic realms. If we are lucid, we will taste all the sweetness and bitterness to know what truly nurtures. If we touch each other with our soul and spirit; heart and body, we will remain lucid.

2020 was a tough teacher, yet full of insights. Let’s hope 2021 brings tenderness for us to integrate all our learnings which will be woven into a better story.

✨ love from yiming

Walter Benjamin

The short essay was written in 1933, between the two World Wars. Benjamin describes the time as “the economic crisis is at the door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war.” The time called for “constructors”, as the catastrophe of the First World War declared bankruptcy of the tradition. Benjamin mentioned some names of those culture constructors: Paul Klee, Adolf Loos, and Paul Scheerbart. He commented: “They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.” For Benjamin, those modernists are fruits of an impoverished culture, a culture divorced from experiences, as “never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers…” Benjamin also pointed out that instead of new experience, people “long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty.”

‘Without a palace of glass, life is a burdensome task.’ Paul Scheerbart’s glass utopia

Almost a century later, are we living such a world, a poor man’s world where one’s daily life contains virtually nothing that can be translated into experience? I’d say yes, although some businessman claims that we live in an “experience economy.” Ironically, experience can never exist an “economy”, as it only presents one-time value to the owner. It calls for raw materials, direct personal participation, an individual authority, and most importantly, recipients who acknowledge the uniqueness of it.

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has a collection of essays called Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. He analyzes in-depth why our mundane urban life depletes our energy to pursue experience. He starts the essay by quoting Benjamin and elaborates his theory that history must “keep on traveling towards and through infancy”. This infancy is the transcendental place of origin where history was born, where knowledge can’t be accessed, nor is it needed. As Carl Jung would say, “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”

Giorgio Agamben

My thoughts?

In Tree of Life of the Qabalah system, there is a stage of creation called Binah. It is the metaphorical mother of the universe. It gives shape to the spirit of the divine. For me, Binah is what experience is like, a black sea, upon which an individual spirit could swim like a killer whale. Unfortunately, contemporary life is more like a manicured aquarium. Most of us feel as insignificant as a tiddler in it.

Experience is invaluable for one’s spiritual life because of its transcending property. It nurtures our psyche by connecting back to where our consciousness starts. Since modernism, we’ve suffered from this aridity of our inner life. Yes, we’ve been free from history. But the price is painfully high. As Benjamin writes, “We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the small change of the contemporary.”

Moreover, secular life is crying for new experience as well. We need to admit that the past decades of making use of this “experience poverty” is purely wantoning mischief. Great damage has been done to the environment and social structure. This freedom is the emporor’s new clothes, which we don’t see nor dare to admit our blindness.

Last but not the least, thanks for this essay, I discovered James Ensor’s painting, which feels even more relevant today:

James Ensor's painting